Name: Baked Mashed Potatoes with Spinach, Frankfurt Style
Ingredients: 4 cups mashed potatoes; 1 cup cooked spinach, finely chopped; ½ teaspoon coarse sea salt; ¼ teaspoon black pepper; ¼ teaspoon ground nutmeg; ½ cup fresh bread crumbs; 2 tablespoons butter

Why it works: Spinach and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 603 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Baked Mashed Potatoes with Spinach, Frankfurt Style

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 300°F (150°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

Prepare the mashed potatoes as directed in the previous recipe.
Add the cooked spinach, salt, pepper, and nutmeg to the potatoes and mix well.

Bake and serve

Transfer the mixture to a buttered baking dish.
Sprinkle the bread crumbs and dot with butter on top.
Bake in a 300°F (150°C) oven until heated through and golden.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

Spinach + nutmegtop 4% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together603 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Potato + spinachtop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together646 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).
Spinach + peppertop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together3,400 recipes

Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).
Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together27,232 recipes

Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).
Pepper + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together13,015 recipes

Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Mashed potatoes: Form the bulk of the dish and give it a soft, creamy body.
Cooked spinach: Adds moisture, color and a mild vegetable flavor to the potatoes.
Bread crumbs: Form a crisp, golden topping through browning in the oven.
Butter: Adds richness and helps the topping brown as it bakes.

Swap the potato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (spinach, pepper, nutmeg, bread, butter):

Shallotfits better
Chivefits about as well
Leekfits about as well
Potatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against spinach, pepper, nutmeg, bread, butter. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.